


Hera, Alone

by GalaxyOwl



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen, Space Angst, diverges from canon around ep. 23
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-04-22 12:54:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4836161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyOwl/pseuds/GalaxyOwl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What if we just, I don’t know, cast off Hera’s mainframe into space, so she didn’t get blown up?”</p>
<p>(In which an innocent suggestion has some unexpected consequences.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s Eiffel who first makes the suggestion. Hera’s pretty sure he’s joking.

“What if we just, I don’t know, cast off Hera’s mainframe into space, so she didn’t get blown up?”

They’re at one of their last-minute emergency meetings, just the three of them. No one says it, but Hera knows it’s because they’re desperate. They only have a few days left to go before they won’t be able to find any more reasons to tell Lovelace as to why they can’t leave yet. And at this point, these meetings are less about any reality of privacy and more about the need to at least feel like they can talk without Lovelace in the room.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Eiffel,” Minkowski says, across the room from him. “It’s not as if her equipment could take that kind of strain, and even if it could—“

As soon as she says it, Hera realizes: “Actually, Commander, I think it could, if we planned far enough in advance.”

Silence, from both of them. 

Hera’s mind is whirling, trying to run the numbers on the situation. Could they salvage enough supplies from the station to create protection for her memory banks? Would the two of them be able to do the necessary work? How long would it take?

She’s so busy thinking about this, in fact, that she neglects to take stock of a very important point:

“Even if it could,” Commander Minkowski continues, “the nuclear reactor—the strain of faster-than-light travel—it wouldn’t work, would it?”

Hera stops. “No,” she says, slowly, “it wouldn’t. I couldn’t attach to the pod.”

Eiffel looks up sharply. “But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t just set her floating in the void.”

“Just that I couldn’t come with you,” Hera concludes, her voice quiet.

***

The rest of the plan falls gradually into place as time passes. Eiffel and Minkowski split their remaining time between working with Lovelace to get their escape pod in order and working with Hera to create a protective armor for her mainframe. 

Eiffel makes jokes about it being her new robot body. Hera thinks that means he’s nervous for her.

She’s nervous for her, too, so it’s okay.

Theoretically, she can survive forever. Eventually her technology will become obsolete, but she won’t die of old age. (Wear-and-tear, but not old age.) But that doesn’t make the prospect of a six billion year journey any more palatable.

The entire plan rides upon someone wandering through this piece of space who’d be willing to pick her up. It’s not a particularly promising prospect. But just now, it’s the only one she has.

The “armor” that takes form is a big hunk of mishmash metal pieces held together by amateur welding jobs, all of it coming together around Minkowski’s old propulsion maneuvering unit—the idea being that they’ll be able to wire her in so that she can control the thrusters and make some sort of headway back in the general direction of Earth. (All the numbers say that it’s a useless gesture, but she can’t talk the others out of it. She’s almost glad. Almost.)

But there’s a small problem: neither Eiffel nor Minkowski are anywhere near qualified to try to wire her into anything.

Which means they have to talk to Hilbert.

Hera refuses, at first. It’s irrational, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t want him going anywhere near her hardware, not after everything.

But it doesn’t matter. When it comes down to it, it’s a choice between that, and letting Lovelace blow her up. (Although, if there’s one thing you can say for Lovelace, it’s that she at least was open about her intentions from the start.)

So as the clock winds down to the date when the five of them leave the Hephaestus in the dust, Hilbert—bribed with an uncertain promise of passage home alongside the others—rewires all of Hera’s systems into the armor.

 _All_ of them.

This was the plan, of course, the only way it would work, but it hits her suddenly, and all she can think of is that’s she’s suddenly blind and deaf and she doesn’t know what’s going on, or where anyone is. And, oh god, what if something on the ship malfunctions while she’d not looking? Because now she can’t look. She can’t tell what’s going on onboard the ship, and every instinct in her screams out that this means something’s broken.

Everything feels dark, and empty, even though she’s still on the ship and she knows that Eiffel and Minkowski (and Hilbert) are all right there, because that’s where there were when she disconnected. But there’s no sound, no image, no heat signatures, and Hera has never felt more alone.

Then she finds the camera they’d worked into the mechanics.

But it’s so _small_. The view is blocked by the metal edges surrounding it, decreasing her line of sight even more, but Hera probably wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t. She’s not used to only being able to see the one place, and it’s still the only sensory equipment she has. No sound. No temperature. No pressure. No anything. Just a flew blots of limited color.

But she can see Eiffel and Minkowski now. So there’s that.

Eiffel’s talking, she realizes from the way his mouth moves, but she doesn’t know whether it’s to her or not—and she wouldn’t be able to hear him either way. Minkowski puts her hand on his shoulder, says something else, then turns and begins to shout at Hilbert.

They don’t realize she’s okay. They don’t realize it worked.

This was the worst plan they’d ever come up with, Hera realizes suddenly, and that’s saying something.

Hera searches back in her memory, trying to think about their plans for the armor. Why can’t she hear them? Wasn’t she supposed to be able to hear them, for this exact reason? But everything around her is silent, and she has no way to communicate.

She tries to talk; the programming, the ability, is all still there, but she knows none of it is hooked into anything. It can’t be. 

“Officer Eiffel,” she says, “Commander Minkowski. Someone—“

All three of the humans turn to look at her. (What a foreign concept, that there’s a singular her to look at.)

Did that work, then? Did she talk?

“Can any of you hear me?” she asks. “Can you—nod if you can hear me. I’m not processing any audio.

“Anyone?”

No nodding. No real indication that they heard or understood her. Just concerned looks from Minkowski and Eiffel. Then Hilbert says something to them, and the three are quickly deep in conversation. She’s never felt cut off like this before. Normally she can hear them, even when they don’t want her to. And now that she needs to hear them…

There’s a bitter irony to it all.

Focus. She can do this. There has to be something here. (Unless Hilbert betrayed them again, screwed up this plan past all hope. But then why give her any visual? No, that doesn’t seem likely.) She tries to feel the different systems, but it’s all so small now she’s disconnected from the beating heart of the ship, and it’s like working under a microscope. She can tell there’s something there, something that she’s not accessing. But she can’t actually _find_ it.

Minkowski disappears from the room. Hera has to stop herself from panicking again, has to remind herself that the commander is still fine. She’s still onboard. She’s just elsewhere, where Hera can’t see her. Or hear her. Or otherwise sense her.

How could she possibly handle billions of years of this?

Eiffel glances nervously between he door to the room and Hilbert, who’s casting odd looks at Hera’s new setup. Finally, Minkowski returns, pen and paper in hand. 

Hera would laugh if she could, at the simplicity of this solution. But she’s relieved that they somehow managed to figure out just what it was that went wrong.

Minkowski takes the paper against the wall and scrawls something onto it, then turns and presses it uncomfortably close to the camera. 

All it says is:

_HERA?_

She tries, knowing it’s useless, to speak aloud again. “Yes,” she says, “it’s me! I read you.” But all this causes is another flurry of conversation between the humans.

She returns her attention to finding the audio reading again. It has to be there. Ugh, this is so stupid. She can run an entire space station, but she can’t handle a single audio recorder? What is this?

Wait—there it was. A sort of static. But, no, now she’s lost it. Again.

There! It’s different this time, but it’s definitely a sensory input. She follows the line, gives it a mental tug, and then—

“—responding.” Minkowski’s voice.

“Would it be too much to hope that it’s just her programming taking a while to, um, settle in?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Hera says, quite proud of herself.

Only that’s not what she says.

The sounds that come out aren’t even words, at least as far as she can tell. It sounds like a series of random, gratingly mechanical beeps, and the disconnect between intention and reality is so jarring it stuns her into silence.

At the sound, the others turn again in the direction of her new sensors—her new _her_. 

“Hera?” Minkowski says again. “Can you hear us?” She starts to unfurl the sheet of paper still held tightly in her hand. But that’s not the problem now. 

“Yes,” Hera tries to say. “Yes, I can hear you now.” Beeps and whistles. Nonsense, useless sounds, that must be the only thing this scrapped-together console can produce. 

“Just—like, one beep for yes, two for no,” Eiffel says. “Can you do that?”

Can she? She doesn’t really know how she’s doing what she’s doing now. But she has to try something. There has to be a way.

She tries to hold a note in her head. A long, steady, _beep_ , to mimic the ones she’d already been producing. Then she pretends she’s saying it out loud. Like she’s singing it.

It works, although it’s an incredibly odd sensation. Eiffel lets out a breath, and while Minkowski doesn’t let it show as much, she’s clearly relieved as well.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

One beep for yes. Hera isn’t sure how true it is, but it’s the answer she needs.

“Is this going to work?” Eiffel says.

Hera starts to say, “I don’t know,” and realizes her mistake too late. She stops herself only for a moment. “Ugh,”, she says, knowing and not caring that they can’t understand her. Hell, _she_ can’t understand her. “I’m sorry. We should have planned better. Or not tried this at all. We should have done _something_ better.” She’s talking to herself. She knows that. She doesn’t care. The whirring beeps that pass through her auditory sensors sound like meaningless gibberish, but when she’s forming them they’re words. “It can’t end like this, can it?”

The engineering room doors slam open to reveal Lovelace. She's formed the beginning of a shout before she sees the others in the room, and her words die. 

Instead she says, “What the hell is going on here?”

For a while, no one moves. No one says anything. 

Finally, Hilbert moves to speak, but Minkowski cuts him off immediately. “We’re saving Hera.”

Lovelace glances towards the armored mainframe again. “That’s Hera?” She doesn’t wait for a response before continuing, “But what’s all that—that racket, with the…”

“Your guess is as good as ours,” Eiffel says, throwing his hands in the air.

Lovelace laughs. She laughs, as if there had been some legitimately funny joke. But she’s the only one laughing. 

Then, Lovelace turns towards the newly-assembled AI mainframe and says, “Hera.” Only her tone is unlike anything Hera’s heard from her in the time she’s been aboard the Hephaestus. It’s gentler, somehow. Softer. “Your communications system is filtering your speech. It’s coming out in … in it’s most basic form.” She pauses. “Basically, you’ re using old bot speak. … Like Rhea used to.”

Hera knows the kind of speech she’s talking about. But it’s more like something from a history textbook than anything. She can recall the dry facts of how old, Gen. 1 A.I.s used to interact with humans, back when their creation wasn’t so heavily focussed on that. And she remembers the recording the others found, Lovelace’s logs, where you could just barely hear Rhea’s simplistic speech. But Hera hadn’t been able to understand it any better than the humans could. It hadn’t seemed like something she would ever use.  
 But, apparently, it was still buried somewhere in the depths of her own code, a useless function no one had ever bothered to weed out.

“Oh,” is all she says aloud. Lovelace smiles. Hera finds herself almost sharing the sentiment. Lovelace can understand her, she realizes. Because she needed to know how to talk to Rhea. Lovelace can understand her, and no one else on the station can. It’s simultaneously comforting and terrifying.

“Okay,” Hera says—tries to say. What her audio receptors pick up is something very different, but she tries to ignore that. “Can you tell them—“ She breaks off. “Can you translate?” It pains her that Lovelace has this power over her now. She can control the conversation, and Hera still doesn’t trust her as far as Eiffel could throw her. This isn’t good. It is, in fact, very far from good.

But Lovelace nods towards Hera’s camera, and turns and turns to explain this to the others.

***

During the time remaining, Hera is left mostly alone. 

It’s a new experience. Even before she was assigned to the Hephaestus, there was always something going on, some problem or person that needed her attention. But now, disconnected from her ship, she is left alone in an empty, unmoving room. 

She supposes she should probably get used to it. She isn’t sure that’s likely.

The others visit her—Eiffel or Minkowski or both will drag Lovelace into the room to translate for them, and they’ll try to talk. But conversation that’s filtered through a translator that you don’t trust is always going to be awkward.

Sometimes Lovelace comes alone, and this is both better and worse. The conversation is more direct, but nothing can change the fact that this is _Lovelace_ , who was ready to kill Hera not twenty-four hours ago. 

 At some point Hera can’t take it any more, and asks her, “Were you really going to kill me?”

Lovelace seems almost surprised by the question. “Yes,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t ideal. But—“

Hera doesn’t want to hear it. “I don’t think there are any ‘but’s necessary, _Captain_ ,” she cuts in.

Lovelace is silent for a moment, then says, “You’re probably right.” She doesn’t elaborate.

And that’s that. Hera’s just grateful Lovelace is apparently willing to let this plan go on unchecked. But it’s still unnerving.

All in all, when the three of them—Eiffel, Minkowski, Lovelace—arrive in the room at once, Hera knows: it’s time to go. That doesn’t make it any easier.

“We’re going to miss you,” Eiffel says, low. “But, hey, safe travels, and all that.”

“You too,” she says, and hopes Lovelace doesn’t somehow manage to botch so simple a message.

All Minkowski says is, “Good luck,” but Hera knows what she means.

It’s likely that they’ll never see each other again. Hera is both completely and not at all surprised by how much the thought continues to pain her.

They move her unit to the airlock. It’s an awkward maneuver that— _shockingly_ —hadn’t been planned out all that well in advance. But they make it. The camera is adjusted so that she can see out, where she’s headed. But this means she can’t see her friends as she tumbles out into the darkness. She wonders whether they wave goodbye, or can’t bare to watch.

There are a few moments of intense disorientation, and then she picks out the brightly-glowing orb of Wolf 359 to her left, and mentally reorients herself. 

Hera’s first coherent thought is that outer space feels cold, but of course that’s her imagination. She doesn’t have any way to be picking up temperature, and even if she did, she doesn’t think that ever really resembled the way humans experience cold. But still, there’s a quality to the emptiness that defies any other description.

She tries out the propulsion unit and finds herself surprised when it works. She experiments some more, but doesn’t move too far. Not yet. 

Moments later, the escape pod zooms past her, so fast and bright she worries it might damage her new metal casings. She isn’t sure she’d be able to tell if it did. 

“Goodbye!” she calls out after them. The sound could never have reached them in the vacuum, but it doesn’t matter either way. They’re already gone.

Hera starts the countdown, in her head. She knows what’s coming.

Five seconds to calculated time of Hephaestus explosion.

She’s going to miss those obnoxious humans so _much_.

Four seconds to explosion.

She doesn’t know what she’s going to do, even if she does somehow make it to Earth.

Three.

The Hephaestus is really the only home she’s ever known. She understands why she can’t stay, but there’ s a nostalgia to the station that the others never really seemed to understand.

Two.

She moves further away, a metal figure floating through the sea of darkness.

One.

Behind her, the Hephaestus explodes in a blaze of silent light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI, I'm listing this as multi-chapter, but it probably won't be more than three or four at most. (Also, I have a pretty bad track record at actually updating multi-chapter fics, so, uh, we'll see how this goes.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now, for the main event: angsty Hera monologuing.

It’s not so bad, at first. Those last few hours on the ship gave Hera enough of an adjustment window that she’s not still trying to check on life support every few minutes. (It’s only every couple hours. And she’s getting better at it already already.)

But, really, it’s not so bad. 

Wolf 359 is rather pretty. (Even if it’s a little overwhelming just how big it is. Hera isn’t used to feeling small, but on a cosmic scale everyone is. Even her.) 

And the other stars, beyond, that before always seemed like background, are now at the forefront of her vision, shimmering dots that she no longer has the technology to analyze as anything more. Oh, sure, the star charts and info are still somewhere in her data banks, but the routes needed to align them with the things she sees? That’s gone. This camera wasn’t built for that.

She moves slowly. Her shredded knowledge of navigation is enough to give her a sense of what direction Earth is in, and that’s the important part here—making sure she’s moving towards it, not away. It won’t make any difference. She knows this. Space is simply too big for a computer with a jetpack strapped to her mainframe to get anywhere. But she moves towards Earth, anyways. Just a little bit.

She doesn’t know how much fuel she has. It can’t be much.

***

She thinks about the others. More than she expected. 

Sometimes she imagines she can still hear their voices. Like, maybe one of these days she’ll suddenly find Eiffel there with her, making some obscure reference about the way the stars look today. Or that Minkowski will be there, muttering about the latest problem to be fixed.

But no matter how hard Hera pretends, they’re never there. They can’t be. But sometimes…

Sometimes she can almost hear Hilbert’s quiet muttering, or Lovelace’s brash statements, things she was never meant to hear in the first place, things she doesn't want to hear. She can hear Eiffel and Minkowski having another argument, and has to resist the urge to chime in.

_They’re gone_ , she reminds herself.

It’s not even that she misses them, necessarily. It’s just that she can’t seem to convince herself that she is really, truly alone. The idea that no one is there to listen to, to talk to—it simply doesn’t compute. There’s always been something for her to keep track of, and now…

***

There were things she’d planned to do, after the mission. She’d assumed somehow, back then, that there would be an _after_ for her. That even once Eiffel and Minkowski and Hilbert had finished their mission and left, she would still be there. Waiting. But after that fateful Christmas, she’d stopped thinking about that. Started thinking about surviving.

She’d been right after all. It’s funny, how things have a way of working out like that.

How much Hera would give to go back to the days when alone didn’t sound like a burden, but a comfort. She wonders if she still can. She has a lot of time, after all. More time than it took to get to where she is. Maybe she can go back, after all.

She doesn’t really think she can.

But there are some things she can do. Some promises she can keep.

She starts to name the colors. 

It feels a little ridiculous, at first. But she keeps at it. She picks through sounds and syllables and word roots she knows, attempts to combine them in meaningful ways. She spends a full week trying to describe the color just shy of red, and a month on the color after that. After all, she has nothing if not time.

When she chooses a name, she whispers it to herself in the depths of her circuitry, and stores it away. She can’t forget them. She has to bring them back to Earth with her.

Earth.

She’s never really been there. Well, of course, she’s been there _physically_ , but only when she was first activated. It hadn’t really taken the people at Goddard Futuristics all that long to decide she needed to be shipped off to the farthest space station they had. Her only memories of Earth are of tests, and of examiners, and of _Yes, sir_ , and _No, sir_. 

She knows this isn’t what the others mean when they say “Earth.” 

When Lovelace said “Earth,” it was with a dark fury; like the only thing she knows is there is the people who sent her out here. When Hilbert said “Earth,” it was with dismissal. It was irrelevant, distant, unimportant to the work at hand. And when Minkowski said “Earth,” it was with longing. It was with love, and sadness, and what she knows can never be again. Hera knew this.

But Eiffel—when Eiffel says “Earth,” he says it with joy. He says it with the demeanor of a kid who just found out their birthday is coming early. When Eiffel talks about Earth, he talks about the people, and the sights, and all the things you can see and do and _be_.

When Eiffel says “Earth,” it makes Hera want to go there.

***

It has been three months since the destruction of the Hephaestus. Nothing has changed. 

Hera thinks she’s starting understand what it means to be tired. She doesn’t need to sleep, of course. She can’t be tired from a lack of it. But she can be tired of waiting—tired of hoping. Tired of pretending. 

She’s been screwing around with the various functions she still has. She can mess with her audio and visual settings to her heart’s delight. Not that it does anything; everything out here is just more of the same. Darkness, and stars, and the brighter light of Wolf 359, behind her. 

If she turns off the visual, will that be like going to sleep?

(She doesn’t leave it long. It’s unsettling enough to be floating without any sensory input _but_ sight. To take away even that is to leave herself stranded mentally as much as physically.)

So many of her systems aren’t hooked up to anything at all, anymore, and it still freaks her out a little when she tries to do something and nothing happens. She knows she’s not connected to any ship, but it’s disturbing regardless. Sometimes, she can still almost forget she’s alone. That’s when it’s the hardest, because she eventually has to remember.

Then she finds the radio. She’s never really used it before; it’s part of her hardware only as an intermediary in the ship sending transmissions back to command. But it’s here, now. 

Which means Hera can talk.

“Hello?” she says, and laughs as she imagines the waves of sound bytes traveling out, out, away through space. Maybe, one day, to Earth. She wonders if it’s even really radio, or the newer technology used for direct communication with the people at Goddard. How quickly will it move, if it’s even broadcasting?

But if it is the pulse relay… That means that there’s a small chance that someone—somewhere—can hear her.

“Hello,” she says again, into the void. “I don’t know if anyone will ever even receive this. Or when they would. But, hey, it’s something, right?” She pauses. She tries to think about what to say next.

“My name is Hera,” she says. “At least, that’s the name they gave me. It’s the only one I’ve ever had, so I guess it’ll have to do.” 

It’s sort of ironic, though, isn’t it? To name a machine after a goddess of marriage and motherhood. What sort of person did they think she would turn out to be? Hera knows about names. She knows they have meanings beyond their intended ones. But does hers? Did it ever? Or was it just the last on a checklist of pleasant-sounded, vaguely feminine names? She wonders about that sometimes. She has a lot of time for wondering these days.

Hera says all this aloud. Or, as close to aloud as she can; she says it into the radio. She doesn’t know how this transmitter works. Or if it works. But she likes to think it does.

“But that’s besides the point,” she continues, although she’s not quite sure she had a point to begin with. “I am traveling through outer space as quickly as I can, but I don’t know if I will ever make it to Earth. I don’t know what will happen to me if I do. But I need people to know: I was here. I existed.

“And, Eiffel? If you ever somehow hear this. I hope you do, somehow. Eiffel, I wanted to tell you… I wanted to say…” She stops, sighs. She doesn’t know what she was going to say. “I just wanted to tell you that I hope you and Minkowski are alright. Wherever you are when you hear this. _When_ ever you are.”

She pauses again.

“Goodbye.”

End transmission. Hope it sends.

***

Hera sends out more every now and then. Mostly, they’re a way to vent. It’s nice to have someone to talk to besides herself, even if that someone is seven light years away and imaginary. But it isn’t a habit that sticks. There just isn’t any point.

She does wish, though, that she could have figured out the radio transmissions before she left the Hephaestus. What she wouldn’t give, to have been able to talk to them for real during those last, precious moments.

Of course, the next step after sending out broadcasts is receiving them. She’s more than a little dazed at the realization that she can do this. The receiver is haphazard and staticky, but it’s definitely there. She doesn’t pick anything up, though. She isn’t sure what she expected to find—a response to her hopeless distress call?—but she doesn’t find it.

At some point, though, she does find something. She finds music. Soft, gentle notes of melody from way far away. The same space transmissions Eiffel had been intercepting for the last few years.

He would have liked to hear this, alien origins or no. Will he remember, on Earth? How much the music mattered? 

Hera tries not to think about it. She lets the radio waves buzz through her speakers, and tries not to think about anything else at all.

***

Some seven months into her journey, the propulsion unit runs out of fuel. And Hera is left, drifting, aimless. Not that this is really all that different from how things already were. But the illusion of movement, at least, was nice.

She wonders how the rest of the crew is doing. Would they have made it to Earth by now? Goddard’s shuttles could make it between the Sun and Wolf 359 in practically half as much time. But given the nature of their vessel, there’s no knowing if they have. 

Wait. 

What is that? 

There’s something on the radar. Does she dare to hope? Could it be a ship, that could pick her up? What would a ship even be doing way out here?

It’s getting closer. She can’t see it visually, but she should be able to soon. Everything feels like it’s moving faster than it should, and she strains and wishes she could adjust her sight. Where is it? Is this what she’s been waiting for?

A looming, grayish form appears in sight. It could be a ship. A really big ship, at least the size of the Hephaestus. She hates to think of the implications of that. But this is what she’s been waiting for. This strange, huge ship could be her ticket to Earth.

Only… it’s not a spaceship. 

It’s a meteor.

And it is getting way too close for comfort.

On instinct, Hera pulls back on the navigation, but there’s nothing there. She has no control, and the hulking stone is coming towards her. What if it hits her? Will she die, or go inactive, or whatever the hell you want to call it?

Has she really come so far, only to be destroyed by a meteor?

It passes close over her. Dark gray. Huge. But it doesn’t hit her. It doesn’t even really come close. If she’d had lungs, or even speakers, Hera would have let out a breath. But as it was, the tension passed, like all other things, in silence. With no one but her to witness it.

***

Hera has named all of the colors, now. As best as she can. She sends the names over her radio, and hopes that maybe someone who needs them will find them someday. It’s a small hope. A simple one.

In another week, she’ll have been traveling for an entire year. Or, not so much traveling, anymore, but drifting. Existing. 

It’s funny, that she still counts the time in days and months and years. Even out here. Even now, without anyone’s sleep cycles or holidays to worry about. It all still comes down to how they do things back on Earth.

A year, then, in Earth terms, since she last interacted with anyone at all. Hera knows that, for humans, isolation isn’t good. But Hera isn’t human. This last year has served to prove that, if nothing else.

She tries not to think about anything but the present. The past brings only bitter nostalgia, and the future only uncertainty and more darkness. She’s alright where she is. This isn’t so bad, not really. A life lived in peace is not the worst she could ask for.

But sometimes, when she isn’t thinking straight, she _still_ forgets. Even after so long, she’ll have a sudden burst of panic that the temperature on the ship has dropped past survivable limits. But then she’ll remember that there is no ship. And no survivors.

***

There’s something on her radar again. 

Hera tries not to pay it any attention. It’s probably another meteor, or comet, or something. She’s seen plenty at this point—enough that she doesn’t get excited anymore. She’s sure that hoping for rescue that won’t come only brings pain.

But that is a very small, very oddly-shaped comet.

No. There’s no way.

The ship comes into view, slowly. Bold, all-caps lettering along its side declare it the property of Goddard Futuristics. She doesn’t know what’s in there. Just that someone is.

There’s only one, tiny problem: she doesn’t have any way to contact them. And the ship is moving fast, even at what most be the slowest leg of its journey. If she doesn’t act quickly, it will pass her right on by.

Radio.

“Hello?” she says. “Is anyone there? Anyone? Please, help.” What can she say? Even if they see her, or hear her, will they have any desire to help? “Can anyone help me?” Hera continues. “Goddard space shuttle, I am talking to you. Respond.” _Please._

Silence. Is Hera even broadcasting anything? Can they even hear her? The ship keeps moving. It’s almost out of sight. Then:

“We hear you. Who is this?”


	3. Chapter 3

Hera doesn’t know what to tell them. “Stop,” is what she does say. “Stop moving, stop the ship.“ If she tells them who she is, will they listen to her? Or—or will they just think she’s some malfunctioning computer that got jettisoned out the airlock?

The voice on the other end—feminine, confused—says, “Why?”

“I…” This is the point of no return. “My ship is floating, marooned, without fuel, just off of your current location,” Hera says. “Can you see it?”

A moment’s hesitation. Then, static as they respond, “Yeah, I see it. Stopping now—“ The broadcast cuts out as the speaker starts to shout something to another crew member. A buzz of static, and then a long moment of silence, as the shuttle pulls to a slow stop.

What happens now?

The voice over the radio returns. “Can you make it to our position, or do you need us to send someone out to get you? How many of you are there?” 

This lie is dissolving too fast; there’s no possible way Hera can convince them that they need to take her entire “ship” aboard. What can she do? What can she say? 

“It’s just me,” she says aloud. (Or, almost aloud.) “I’m the only one le—left.” Only, her voice glitches on the last word, and it echoes oddly through the transmission. She stops talking. There is what feels like an eternity’s worth of silence.

“What was… Uh, you’re breaking up.” 

“Yeah, um, sorry,” Hera says, and it’s a good thing she has that excuse because her voice refuses to cooperate—it splinters and glitches and echoes and she curses the people who made her.

There’s another pause. The communications are still open, though, Hera realizes—she can hear the woman’s breathing on the other end, can just barely hear the sounds of movement farther off. At least, she likes to think she can. Finally, the speaker says, voice low, “We don’t know how to fly this thing. There’s no way we can pick you up. Can you make it over?” 

The amount of regret audible in that voice is enough to give Hera the courage to respond, “Actually… I—I may have been misleading you somewhat on the details of the situation.”

“How so?” Her voice is low.

“Well… Let’s just say that, it’s not a ship,” Hera says.

“What the hell does that mean? If that’s not a ship, what is it?” At least this person is direct.

“It’s… me.”

And then she starts to explain.

It’s clear at first that this person—no, people, she realizes, as the conversation progresses—simply don’t believe her. Don’t believe that an AI could have survived on her own all this way—or don’t believe one would care enough to. Hera can’t be sure of their thoughts. 

But even when truth is stranger than fiction, it can be hard to deny. Eventually, they come around. At least, Hera thinks they do. She hopes.

The transmission cuts out at random intervals. Hera isn’t sure whether this is the product of technical difficulties or if they just don’t want her to hear what they’re saying next. 

This time, the line stays silent for a long time. 

“Hello?” Hera says.

“Yeah, uh, sorry.” It’s the second voice. The other member of the conversation, who’s existence she’d just barely been able to glean. “My commanding officer here is trying to figure out how to change the shuttle’s flight path to get to you. So now you have me, I guess.” Silence returns for a moment, and then the new speaker says, “You got a name? Do—do AIs usually have names?”

“My name is Hera.”

“Oh.” A pause. “I’m Dr. Seki,” he says, “soon to—“ Something cuts him off, although what, she can’t tell.

Hera watches the shuttle. It looks uncomfortably big, but she’s pretty sure that her sense of scale has been off ever since she was delinked from the station. Nothing around her moves. Not the ship, not the stars.

The radio crackles. There are no more words from the ship. She wouldn’t be surprised if they gave up. There’s no purpose, for them, to come to her rescue; for all she knows, they could be responsible for sending everyone out here. Only—

“Hey, uh, Hera? Are you there?” comes the voice again, and it takes all of Hera’s self-control not to react to his unfortunate choice of words.

“Yes,” she says instead, her voice shaky.

“We think we can do it now.” And true to this word, the ship starts to move again. Towards Hera, and then, in a flash, past her. And then, in a flash, gone.

Did they just leave her? What—what just happened? What should she do? “Hello?” Anyone?   
 Five seconds pass.

Then the ship reappears, the radio screams with the commanding officer’s “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” as the vessel maneuvers towards Hera. 

Now, for the hard part. 

Because even if she has these people’s full support—which she still isn’t sure that she does—there’s no knowing if there’s any way to get her onto their ship. To have waited so long, only to be stopped by the same problem as the one that set her on this path in the first place…

“Okay,” Hera says aloud, trying—and probably failing—not to let her panic show. “What’s the plan?”

Silence. Or, close enough to it. The slight static still sounds so loud after the nothing of space, but Hera knows an awkward pause when she hears one.

“Alright,” she says again. “I’m glad we had this discussion.” 

No one says anything. Hera racks her mind, runs through her databanks to try to think of some sort of solution, because there has to be _something_. Because ridiculous happenstance has gotten her this far, at least.

An idea. It’s a long shot, but… “Do you think you could access the onboard AI, get me connected to them?” 

“Um,” says the woman. “I don’t… Doctor, do you…”

Seki: “I don’t think there’s an AI piloting the shuttle. The autopilot system is simple enough that it’s not needed.”

Hera remembers the shuttle to the Hephaestus. Or, snippets of it. Nothing concrete, just vague impressions of empty space and people she didn’t yet know. Did they even realize she was there? That she was as new to the station as any of them? When they did arrive.

Not important. Focus. Talk.

“No, not actively piloting the ship,” she says. “Possibly not even turned on at all, but in the ship’s mainframe, the consciousness should be there.” Has to be there.

The doctor gets out half a word before the transmission shuts off. Hera waits. 

It cuts back. “There’s nothing there.”

“Okay,” she says, for maybe the fiftieth time. “Okay, can you give me a reading of what model the shuttle is? That should tell us if there’s an AI onboard.”

“He’s looking it up,” the commander says, and a moment later the other of the two chimes in with the model number. Hera looks up the model in her database. Simple enough, as little as she’s had the need to do something like that recently. 

“There should be one,” she says. “Access code 195302 to get a reading on it.”

“Yeah. There’s—there’s nothing there. That’s what I was saying earlier.”

The Goddard Futuristics shuttle sits, unmoving, in space, and there is only the three of them there.

Just the two of them on that shuttle, then. Headed… somewhere. No. Not thinking about that. Not thinking about the implications of finding these people way out here in the middle of nowhere. It’s not important. Focus, Hera. Talk.

Only she can’t seem to find the words. Can’t seem to find a solution to this problem.

“Uh,” Seki says after a moment’s quiet. “I mean, if there’s nothing there, than, can you—could _you_ be stored… in the shuttle? Is that how that works?”

Hera can’t believe the thought hadn’t occurred to her. “That is, in fact, how that works.” At least, she hopes it is.

***

It’s an awkward maneuver, to say the least. In the end, the commander has to put on a space suit to go out and tow Hera in, and then there’s this whole affair with connecting a wire into the utter mess that Hera’s once-armor has become, and then—

But it works. They make it. Hera can tell it works. Against all odds, against all probability and reason. 

Disconnect the wire. Cast the collection of metal and moving parts that was, briefly, Hera, out into the abyss of empty space. 

She’s on a ship again! It’s not like the Hephaestus. It’s small and she doesn’t know her way around, and the voices and images of her new friends—are they friends?—feel blurred and far-away. But she’s alright. She’s not alone, anymore, as much as she hates to admit that it matters. She’s going to be okay, now, if she can just—

///////////

***

Hera is just lucid enough to realize what’s going on. 

The shuttle’s computer banks can handle an AI, but not in the sense that a big station like the Hephaestus can. There’s some code there, something pressing up against her, that asks—that _requires_ that the AI there functions only peripherally. She can’t hold her focus on any one thing. Time seems to slide by without warning, and talking? Sounds like it would take more energy than she could muster.

All she gets is flashes, vague images.

She never thought about it so much, last time, but now…

The two humans are yelling. About her? Yes, but also no.

(The woman’s name is Noether, she learns. She can do nothing with this piece of information.)

The man is yelling at the woman for endangering her life, and she’s saying something about morals, and following your gut, and then he’s saying something about priorities, and then she’s saying something that sounds an awful lot like “artificial intelligences are people too,” and then—

Another woman is yelling at another man, about something that isn’t as important but seemed like it was at the time, and Eiffel is rolling his eyes, and Minkowski is telling him to please take this seriously, this is _important_. And then—

She’s apologizing, muttering. He’s apologizing, not speaking. Neither of them are talking about Hera any more. “Let’s just get going,” Noether says. Something in the ship roars to life, and Hera can sense this change but she can’t control it. And—

Lovelace is threatening to blow up the ship. Hera wonders if she realizes, if she’s even thinking about what that means for her. Or if she’s just so focussed on herself that she can’t stop for one second to think about someone as _inconsequential_ as Hera. And—

Everyone is asleep. The ship is silent, relatively speaking. Only now Hera can’t remember which ship it is. The shuttle to the station, that’s why she’s so blurry. But no, that was years ago, she’s on the Hephaestus, she’s home, only the Hephaestus was blown up, remember? Lovelace blew it up, Lovelace was going to blow it up, Lovelace is going to—

“I’m sorry, we’re in the wrong place—I—I must have—“ He’s stuttering, staring at—not at. Out. Out the window. At the emptiness. Or, no, not emptiness. The wreckage.

“No,” Noether responds, pointedly staring anywhere but out. “No, it’s not that. Something’s wrong. Something is very, very wrong.”

What’s outside the window? Hera’s trying to see, but her sensory input is limited here, and it’s hard to focus on everything because she’s just so—she’s so—

"Tired" is not the right word. Tired implies sleep, implies very specific biological functions. (There are times when it doesn’t, of course, Hera understands metaphor, but this isn’t one of those times.) Hera doesn’t sleep. Doesn’t dream. So it isn’t right that she keeps coming back to these words. But they’re the only ones she has.

People say a computer that’s dormant is in “sleep mode.” That’s always the language. Shh, be quiet, don’t wake it up. The laptop is sleeping.

But laptop computers don’t have dreams of friends they haven’t seen in years, of broken promises and betrayal and more fear than she’d like to admit. Dreams of plant monsters and red dwarfs and years’ worth of lived experiences crunched into one long, thin dream that simply shouldn’t be. Dreams of—

She remembers. It’s not like the other memories, that drift into her consciousness like a fog covering a city. This one is sharp. Sudden. Wrong.

Eiffel is talking. Not about her. To her? Yes. And no. He calls her a name that isn’t her name, and he sighs, and Hera responds. Only she doesn’t. She can hear herself, feel herself, but it’s not her. She knows this as fact.

“Eiffel,” she wants to say.

“Where are you?” she wants to say.

“I miss you,” she wants to say.

She says none of these things. She never did.

Eiffel is talking: “I miss you,” he says. “I know that you can’t hear me. I know you’re not… you. Hera. But I just…” He pauses. “I hope I can talk to you soon. I hope… I don’t know. ” He stops, shakes his head. “God, what am I doing?” he mutters. “Just listen to that idiot Eiffel. Talking to an empty room.”

It finally clicks: 

Hera’s dead. Or offline, or deactivated, or whatever the hell you want to call it. She’s dead. She can’t be hearing this, can’t be seeing this, that’s not how this works. It can’t be. She doesn’t remember any of this.

***

“—the Hephaestus?” Right words. Wrong person. The commanding officer (not Minkowski, not Lovelace, _the other one_ ) is talking. Not to Hera. Not about Hera. But about what was once Hera’s. 

“I don’t know,” Seki says.

“What do we do now?” Noether whispers. 

They’re confused, and lost, and Hera needs to—they need her. They don’t even know it, those idiot humans, but they need her if they’re ever going to figure out what’s going on, if they’re ever going to make it back to Earth. Because this has happened before, Hera saw it once, only this time the Hephaestus isn’t there when they get there and everything is happening faster.

But Hera can’t talk. She can’t be there.

She slips back again into the deluge of memories. Everything that happened, everything that went wrong, it’s all there and it’s all still happening and it shouldn’t be so recent but it is.

She sees more of the time when she wasn’t there. She sees all of it, remembers it all in crystal-perfect detail. What sort of creature is she, to come back from the dead?

She sees other times. Times before the Hephaestus. Times after.

She sees—well, she hears:

“Hera, are you there?”

“Yes, Eiffel,” the same moment every time. He asks and she answers and that’s how it is until it isn’t.

Only: 

“…What?”

What?

“What did you—Commander!” Then the commander is there, but it’s not the right one. It’s—ohhh. 

That wasn’t Eiffel.

“Wait, can you hear me?” Hera asks, and her voice sounds weird, distorted, because this a different speaker system and _oh my god they can hear her_.

He nods, then says, “Wait, can you—“

“I can see you nodding, yes.” She tries to think quickly. At any moment, she could slip back again, so she has to think quickly. Talk quickly.

“Listen,” she says. “I need you to listen, I—I probably don’t have too much time. This is the Hephaestus, yes. Or what’s left of it. I don’t know if Goddard knew what happened when they sent you out here, or if they just didn’t care, but this is all for the best because trust me when I say: you would have died here.” As she speaks, she’s struck by the way her words echo another speaker, another message. She thinks of Lovelace, and her message for them stored away in the depths of the ship’s systems. The one Hera wasn’t able to find on her own. How many times did she wonder what things would have been like if the she’d just checked the auxiliary power more closely?

Not important. Focus. Talk.

Here’s Hera, then, carrying on this grand tradition for the next generation of deep-space deathtrap fodder. 

“I was the AI on _this station_ ,” she says, “the one that you were somehow supposed to run, just the two of you. I’m sure that was going to go well. But, you know what, that doesn’t matter now. Because the Hephaestus gone, and you have got to get home as fast as—as/—as\\\—“

Hera slips back again. The system on this shuttle is faulty, faulty enough to let her through but not enough to let her stay. She slips, and she lets the dreams—the almost-dreams—consume her.


	4. Chapter 4

“—making any promises. I know what I’m doing, but…”

The man—it takes a moment for Hera to identify him as the new one, Seki—nods in response. “Yeah. I know. You’ve… Yeah.”

Oh. _Something_ is different. Not with the humans, they’re the same as last they spoke, but Hera is, well, incredibly lucid. She’s awake, for all that counts for anything.

The two humans are staring at a computer screen. At—at Hera? Or what they perceive to be Hera at that moment, which may as well be the same thing. “Hello?” Seki says.

Hera wants to say “Hello” back. But she can’t. Nothing is connected to anything. And she thinks that that can’t be right, because it worked _before_. She talked to them. At least, she’s pretty sure she did. Like, 70%. She’s 70% sure that actually happened, and she didn’t just dream it. Which is a 30% chance that it didn’t, which is… actually more than a little terrifying.

Maybe she just doesn’t know the shuttle’s pathways well enough. She tries to think, to examine her options, but everything is closed off, just as she’d thought before. She can’t do anything.

She’s awake, but she’s trapped. Which is quite possibly worse than not being awake at all.

“What’s the next plan?” Seki asks. Noether sighs, nods, types something on the computer console.

And Hera slips away again.

There are whispers and voices, images from Hera’s past that she’d thought she’d long since moved on from. Whatever poorly thought-out system that’s causing these… dreams, it doesn’t care for logic or chronology. It just _is_. Hera’s life playing out before her in fragments.

Sometimes the voices are different, and some small part of her wonders if she’s been yanked back to the present. But it’s never for long enough to tell.

Sometimes she wonders whether there is any present at all.

***

The shuttle’s reality slams into Hera’s consciousness without warning. A present moment real and physical and there.

“Hello,” Commander Noether says to the ceiling, not a greeting so much as a deflated question. She sits by the computer terminal, hands still resting on the keyboard, says “Anything? Anyone?”

“Yes!” Hera says, only—oh. Well.

She remembers clear as yesterday the day she left the station. Everything had gone wrong right from the start, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. But she hadn’t expected her language faculties to so turn on her as they had. And she wouldn’t have expected it to happen again here, of all places. 

“That’s, uh, is that… supposed to happen?” Seki asks.

Hera laughs, but it’s a laugh that’s only audible in soft, musical beeps. It’s different than it was before, she realizes—the half-hazard “body” they’d assembled had different instruments available to it, and so made different sounds. And Rhea, with all of the Hephaestus’ brilliant noises, had sounded different, too. It isn’t meaningless noises. It’s a language, and each person speaks it differently. She understands that now.

But it isn’t a language either of these humans can understand.

“No,” Noether says, in response to Seki’s question. She sounds tired. “Unless—Hera?”

Hera responds as best she can—loudly, energetically, but still without words that they could understand. It’s _incredibly_ frustrating. 

“Oh,” Noether says. She doesn’t say anything further but returns to the computer, starts tapping at the keyboard. “If I’m right,” she explains to her colleague, “if that _is_ Hera, and she’s just slipped a circuit… I can make this work.”

 A few moments later, and Noether says, “Alright. Hera?” She raises her voice on this last word—presumably to make sure Hera could hear, which is a little ridiculous. 

“I don’t know,” Hera says as a test, and is disappointed when the only noise that comes out is the beeps. It didn’t work.

To her confusion, Noether says, “Yes!” just as Hera is coming to this conclusion. It takes her a moment to figure out why—her visual processors here aren’t particularly high-quality, at least when compared to the Hephaestus, and it takes her a couple of beats to notice the text displayed on the screen Noether had been working at. It’s Hera’s words, in normal English.

“You’re displaying my speech as text?” she says.

Noether looks up from the screen. “Yes,” she says, then, “Is it alright for me to respond verbally?” Hera assures her that it is. 

She hasn’t had a conversation like this in _so long_. Even thought she can’t talk aloud like she would normally—that pathway, along with directly controlling any part of the ship, is blocked—it’s somehow such a relief to be _heard_. Even by this relative stranger.

She can, however, access pieces of the ship’s databanks. They’re only a few days’ journey from Earth. Which seems impossible—it must have taken months to get to where they are, but in her low-power mode it had seemed to her like days at most itself.

***

Excitement thrums through Hera. “The shuttle’s instruments are indicating that we’re on approach to Earth,” she says, and the not-quite-meaningless beeps rise up from the computer. Seki, who’s closest, stops his pacing and glances at the screen to read her message.

“What does our new friend have to say?” Noether asks from across the room. Seki relays Hera’s message, and Noether nods to herself in response. “We’re almost home,” she says. “Without ever making it anywhere else.”

She doesn’t really understand, no matter how much Hera’s told her in the last few days. About how bad things got on the Hephaestus. About how lucky she is it didn’t happen to her.

Maybe that’s a good thing, though.

There’s a moment of quiet; Noether begins to look over the numbers on the computer console—minutes and seconds until they enter Earth’s orbit. Then Hera says, “So, do you guys actually know how to land this thing?”

“No,” Noether admits, and the speed with which she makes this response seems to imply that she’s already considered this question. “But I’m sure we can figure it out.”

That’s less than reassuring, to be sure, but Hera can’t do anything about it herself, beyond trying to think her way towards a solution. So she just says, “Alright. Let me know if I can help.” Noether doesn’t say anything in response.

“Uh.” Seki looks at the screen from behind her. “Do we—do we really have no idea how to land?”

Noether sighs, looks up at him. “I’m not really sure it’s _built_ to land,” she admits.

Of course it isn’t. Hera knew that, on some level, but she’d been so busy with being alive that she hadn’t gotten around to worrying about it too extensively just yet. This is going to be interesting. And in this situation, “interesting” means “possibly deadly.” (It almost reminds her of the Hephaestus.)

She doesn’t know what she’s going to do if things go wrong. She’s made it so far, she can’t believe it would all end here. There was a time when she thought she would never see Earth again, and now—

_Oh_. 

Now, it’s right outside the window. 

And even though she can only see it by looking past the reflective glare of the glass, she thinks it might just be the most beautiful thing she’d seen since she left Wolf 359 behind. She’s seen photos, of course, of what the Earth looks like from space. But this is different, somehow. More real.

She thinks of the others for the first time in a while. Eiffel and Minkowski. Is he down there somewhere? Are any of them? It’s a question she’s avoided, but suddenly they’re _there_ , and…

“Hera.” Noether’s voice draws her attention to the interior of the shuttle. But with part of her mind—the part that isn’t listening, the part that isn’t busy trying to run numbers on their landing approach—she keeps watching the blue planet through the window.

“Hera,” Noether repeats.

“Yes, Commander?” Hera says, a response born more from years of habit than anything else.

“Do you have specs on the shuttle? Can it survive reentry intact? Not even right-side up or functioning or anything. Intact.”

Hera pulls up the information she has on the ship she’s in. Calculates energy exerted on the hull upon entering the atmosphere, the thickness of the metal, how much can it take before it breaks?

“I think so,” she says. 

“Alright,” Noether says, and then with a smile, “we’re gonna crash a spaceship.”

“What?” Seki says, speaking up for once. “No. That—that can’t go well. We can’t—We can radio for help from the ground. Someone can figure it out, make sure we make it there safe. Can’t we?”

Noether turns away from the computer console to face him. “No,” she says, “we can’t. I’ve been screwing with the computer to get Hera active for the last two months; I broke the comms systems three weeks ago. I don’t think we have any other options.”

Both of the humans fall silent, for a moment. Hera tells them the approach angle they’ll need to make if they want any hope of making it to the ground even marginally intact. 

Noether goes to the controls, and then the whole ship shudders as they’re pulled in towards Earth.

The next few minutes are a nonstop blur of light and motion and more than a little shouting. The shuttle burns with the heat of reentry and Hera thinks to herself, _This is it_.

And then, in an instant, in a loud, terrifying _bang_ , it all ends.

One of the outer windows is facing down into the brown earth, another up towards the soft blue of the atmosphere. For a long moment, Hera doesn’t process anything more than that. She doesn’t know if the human crew are alive or dead. She doesn’t know if her old crew are alive or dead. She doesn’t know what the future holds, or what the past means, or even where on Earth she is in this present. But the sky is blue and the Earth is real and Hera is home.

And she does know one, single truth: she _made_ it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: this was originally going to be one-shot. It is now the longest fanfic I've ever written.


End file.
